Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues by Sarah Emsley has taken a favored
place on my short shelf of critical studies
that most usefully illuminate Jane
Austen. This book’s slim physical presence
belies the depth and comprehensiveness
of its strong, patient, subtle
argument. Well-informed by classic and
current scholarship, Emsley follows
Alistair MacIntyre in seeing Austen as
“the last great representative” of the “tradition
of the virtues;” but the specifics of
the book’s argument are clearly her own.
Jane Austen emerges from these pages
as a woman who takes ethical development
and the vocation of novelist seriously.
Focusing on transcendent values
rather than on historical and political
contingencies, Emsley’s Austen resists
being reduced to either an apologist for
the status quo or a precocious articulator
of secular ethical relativism. Instead,
Emsley sees usten as conservative yet
flexible, crucially interested in how the
classical and the Christian virtues interact
and sometimes compete in life as
lived in her time. Emsley argues with
conviction that Austen’s heroines are
less centrally concerned with “Whom
shall I marry?” than with “How should I
live my life?”—and accordingly that
Austen’s novels present, in diverse ways
that highlight various virtues and combinations
of virtues, moral educations
that prepare her characters for ethical
action in their communities. Thus
Austen’s fictions offer “living arguments”
for the practice of the virtues, both classical (prudence, justice, fortitude,
temperance) and Christian
(charity, faith, hope).

Emsley’s scrupulous critical approach
acknowledges and foregrounds the
union of moral complexity and faith that
distinguishes Austen’s novels of manners
and morals from what preceded and
what follows them. msley’s first chapter
on “The Virtues According to
Aristotle, Aquinas, and Austen” offers
the background to Austen’s understanding
of the classical and biblical virtues.
Subsequent chapters proceed to explore
moral education in the six novels plus
Lady Susan. Emsley begins by assessing
“Propriety’s Claims on Prudence in
Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey,”
both of which she sees as less complex
than the later case studies. If Lady Susan is prudent in the worldly sense, playing
upon propriety to hide amorality,
Catherine Morland is an intuitively
moral being who must learn prudence
and must discover how to reconcile the
appearance of propriety with its essence.
“Sense and Sensibility: ‘Know Your
Own Happiness’” introduces one of
most compelling themes of Emsley’s
book, the tensions arising when different
virtues must be practiced simultaneously
and kept in proper balance, by
arguing against easy polarities in the
cases and characters of Elinor and
Marianne. Similarly, in the next chapter,
“Pride and Prejudice and the Beauty of
Justice,” Elizabeth and Darcy’s mutual
educations both involve the recognition
of mistakes and righting of wrong judgments
that eventually allow the two
characters to fulfill themselves as loving,
ethical individuals and as a couple.
Pride and Prejudice recognizes the difficulties
of competing virtues—civility
versus honesty, charity versus justice—
and the surprising ways anger, prejudice,
and discrimination can, if handled
rightly, serve virtue. Pride and Prejudice is, for Emsley, Austen’s most effectively
dramatized and most comprehensive
study of how both women and men can
learn to practice a range of virtues.

Mansfield Park’s heroine, so often
attacked or dismissed on various
grounds, is stoutly defended in “Fanny
Price and the Contemplative Life.”
Emsley argues that although Fanny may
be consistently virtuous, her virtue is not
static. Close scrutiny reveals Fanny—a
reader, a nurturer of plants, an appreciator
of nature—as far from the rigid
naysayer she’s sometimes said to be.
Morally strong through contemplative
habit, she nonetheless desires growth
and development. If Fanny Price lives
too much in her moralizing thoughts,
Emma Woodhouse initially thinks too
little about her moral self. “Learning the
Art of Charity in Emma” centers on how
this novel’s fortunate and energetic heroine
must learn that charity involves attitude
as well as action. Emsley sees
Austen’s brilliant presentation of
Emma’s blundering but Knightley-mentored
progress toward self-knowledge
and moral wisdom as second only to
Pride and Prejudice in dramatic effectiveness.
Anne Elliot, like Knightley or
Fanny, has little to learn about the practice
of the virtues. Instead, “Balancing
the Virtues in Persuasion” shows how
tested strength has allowed Anne to
endure disappointed love—and how the
Christian virtue of hope grows to balance
her classical fortitude. According
to MacIntyre, constancy undergirds all
Anne’s other virtues—and faith is fundamental
to constancy, argues Emsley.
The loss of faith is what Emsley sees as
setting Austen’s moral explorations apart
from those of novelists who can be seen
as her descendants: George Eliot, Henry
James, Edith Wharton. The coda “After
Austen” suggests that although great
writing can exist in an age of doubt, the
tradition of the virtues must fade and
diminish—and thus that the coherent
complexity of Austen’s philosophy of
the virtues has never since been surpassed
or equaled. Nor has it hitherto
been fully explicated with Emsley’s
admirable blend of clarity, precision,
erudition, and plausibility.

Peter W. Graham is a professor of English at
Virginia Tech and Director of International
Relations for the Missolonghi Byron
Research Center in Greece. He is completing
a study of Jane Austen, Charles Darwin,
empiricism, and serendipity.